How novels came to terms with the internet

Back in the early 1990s, David Foster Wallace wrote an essay urging young American novelists to find a way to come to terms with the role of television in contemporary life. He believed they were going about it the wrong way, but at least they were trying, which was more than he could say for the generation of older writers he complained about in the same piece ("E Unibus Pluram: Television and US Fiction"). One of these, an unnamed "gray eminence" who ran a graduate workshop that Wallace attended in the 1980s, scolded his students for including "trendy mass-popular-media" references in their work. Treating of such things, he insisted, would only date their writing, pegging it as belonging to the "frivolous Now" instead of to the proper province of literature, the "Timeless".

Twenty years later, in the current frivolous Now, Wallace's essay itself seems a shade dated, and not just because today's novelists confront a very different communications behemoth in the form of the internet. The notion of a cadre of literary novelists, young or old, eager to depict the moment we live in – let alone battling conservative naysayers for the right to do so – is almost quaint. When reading for a American literary prize a couple of years ago, I was struck by how strenuously most of the entrants seemed to be skirting that challenge.

Writing historical fiction is the easiest way to escape the Now; to avoid dealing with the internet, you only have to step back a decade or two. If you'd prefer to write about characters entirely innocent of TV, you'd need to retreat as far as the 1940s; then you get the second world war and the Holocaust, subjects that, despite their historical specificity, are understood by everyone to be unimpeachably Timeless.

Venturing back in time isn't the only option for novelists loath to address the mass media that most of us marinate in. There are also those populations cut off from the mainstream for cultural reasons, such as recent immigrants and their families – a very popular choice of fictional subject these days. And then there are those at the geographical margins, living in remote rural areas where broadband access is hard to come by. It's remarkable how many recent American literary novels and short stories are set on ranches, from writers as established as Annie Proulx and Cormac McCarthy to newcomers such as Maile Meloy and CE Morgan. And this is especially curious when you consider that the vast majority of the people who write and read these works live in cities and suburbs. Perhaps it's because the characters in ranch novels spend most of their time contemplatively driving long distances in trucks or climbing up snowy mountains to rescue stranded animals, scenarios in which there's absolutely no danger that a TV will be switched on or a laptop flipped open. (Real-life ranchers, of course, treasure their satellite dishes.)

As the showdown in Wallace's graduate workshop indicated, the American novelist is buffeted by two increasingly contradictory imperatives. The first comes as the directive to depict "The Way We Live Now" – a phrase whose origins in the title of a Trollope novel have been almost entirely obscured by countless deployments in reviews and publisher's blurbs. Cliché it may be, but the notion that no one is better suited to explain the dilemmas of contemporary life than the novelist persists. After the 9/11 attacks, every fiction writer of note reported receiving dozens of calls from magazine editors, each looking for insights and ruminations that a whole industry full of accomplished journalists was apparently insufficiently thoughtful to summon on its own.

Which brings us to the other designated special province of the literary novelist: museum-quality depth. The further literature is driven to the outskirts of the culture, the more it is cherished as a sanctuary from everything coarse, shallow and meretricious in that culture. It is the chapel of profundity, and about as lively and well visited as a bricks-and-mortar chapel to boot. Literature is where you retreat when you're sick of celebrity divorces, political mudslinging, office intrigues, trials of the century, new Apple products, internet flame wars, sexting and X Factor contestants – in short, everything that everybody else spends most of their time thinking and talking about.

If these two missions seem incompatible, that's because they are. To encompass both, as Wallace aimed to do, you must be able to derive the Timeless from a series of frivolous Nows, and then you have to persuade your readers that you have given them what they want by presenting them with what they were trying to get away from when they came to you in the first place. No wonder American literary novelists have found it easier just to bow out of the whole "Way We Live Now" rat race, especially when the designated enemy was television. Sure, people spend (or spent) six hours per day watching TV, but they aren't actually doing anything while they're at it. You can address the time your characters presumably squander in front of the tube the same way you treat the time they spend asleep: by passing over it in silence.

However, the internet, as we are always being told, is different. Only certain parts of it are passively consumed, while others have completely supplanted longstanding realms of daily activity and human interaction. For example, High Fidelity, with its once-hip record-store setting, has been transformed into a nostalgic artefact by the advent of downloadable music files. (Where do guys like that congregate these days?) Some vast number of people now meet their partners through the rationalised sifting of online dating services rather than haphazardly, at parties or bars. Smartphones prevent us from ever getting lost, unintentionally or on purpose. Social networking routinely returns long-gone friends, lovers and enemies into the unfolding of our present-day lives. People we've met in person once – or never – start to seem like bona fide pals, and unlike the "friends" we once fantasised TV characters to be, these people friend us right back.

The internet has altered our lives in ways television never did or could, but mainstream literary novelists – by which I mean writers who specialise in realistic, character-based narratives – have mostly shied away from writing about this, perhaps hoping that, like TV, it could be safely ignored. They've ceded the field to authors of speculative fiction, such as William Gibson and Cory Doctorow, whose hacker and brand-ninja characters exist primarily to explain or propound ideas about bleeding-edge technology, or thriller writers who concoct ingenious but outlandish tales about the potential nightmares lurking in same. (Take, for example, "Daemon" by Daniel Suarez, whose bad guy is already dead when the book begins; his evil deeds are perpetrated posthumously by the computer program he designed before succumbing to cancer.) There have been some gimmicky stunt novels – routine romantic comedies told entirely in emails or status updates or text messages – but more searching depictions of how technology is embedded in the lives of ordinary people have been pretty rare.

This situation has begun, tentatively, to change (and it remains to be seen what Wallace himself made of it, when his final work, The Pale King, is published in April). In 2009, Jonathan Lethem's Chronic City featured a motley assortment of pot-smoking Manhattanites who become obsessed with "chaldrons", beautiful, urnlike objects that none of them has actually seen in person. They spend long nights holed up in their apartments, bidding for the elusive things on eBay and losing every time to rivals veiled behind cryptic monikers. Suspicions of a conspiracy roil. The New York of Chronic City is a farrago of rumours, mirages and false identities where everything that is most desirable wavers just beyond reach or may not even exist. Information of dubious validity and unknown origins perfumes the streets along with a mysterious chocolatey aroma, driving everybody nuts. There is no reliable boundary between what is true and what people want to be true or say to be true. (One character keeps revising the Wikipedia entry on Marlon Brando to conform to his conviction that the actor is still alive.) In short, Manhattan appears to be an extension of the internet, or vice versa.

In Jess Walter's The Financial Lives of the Poets, the web plays a more conventionally disruptive, siren-like role in the disintegration of a suburban family. At the peak of the pre-recession boom, Matt Prior quit his job as a business reporter to launch his own business – a website featuring literary financial journalism, including poetry. Now, post-recession, with his big idea gone predictably bust and his former profession imploding, Matt finds himself underwater on his mortgage. He's on the verge of losing his house and convinced that his wife is about to have an affair with an old boyfriend she reconnected with through Facebook. Matt and Lisa's marital estrangement may be the stuff of a classic John Updike or Richard Yates novel, but the internet feeds a fuel of deluded fantasy into the forces pulling them apart. She thinks she can recapture her romantic innocence, and he flatters himself into believing that late capitalism craves its own poet laureate.

It is what the internet lures out of us – hubris, daydreams, avarice, obsessions – that makes it so potent and so volatile. TV's power is serenely impervious; it does all the talking, and we can only listen or turn it off. But the internet is at least partly us; we write it as well as read it, perform for it as well as watch it, create it as well as consume it. Watching TV is a solitary activity that feels like a communal one, while the internet is a communal experience masquerading as solitude.

This paradox lies at the root of so much of the uncivil and downright cruel behaviour that everyone complains about in online interactions: you can insult someone without lingering to witness the damage you've done, make messes you'll never have to clean up. For David Pinner, the miserable protagonist of Nick Laird's Glover's Mistake, the internet facilitates the apotheosis of his passive-aggression. In the form of an anonymous blog called the Damp Review, he posts merciless takedowns of the people he fawns over in real life. "The Dampener", his alter ego, is "unafraid, hard-boiled, outrageous", posting reviews of everything from movies to sandwiches, and among the dozen or so malcontents who become his readers, his rancour is "applauded. He was permitted. He felt fine."

Nevertheless, because the internet will (sometimes) listen to us, the internet, unlike TV, can compel us to listen to ourselves. The paradigm of the anti-TV insurgent is Howard Beale, from the 1976 Paddy Chayefsky film Network, a newscaster turned mad-as-hell everyman who refuses to "take it" any more. By melting down on the air and venting his rage against what another characters describes as television's "common rubble of banality", Beale becomes a hero to millions. Since TV requires only that its viewers "take it", Beale's simple refusal is enough to constitute a principled insurrection. His fury has no real shape or purpose; its virtue lies in the contrast between its singular, uncompromising, heedless intensity and the pablum all around it.

Here's the thing, though: unlike TV in the 1970s, the web has a surplus of Howard Beales. He may have been the only guy on TV who yelled at TV the way countless guys at home were yelling at their TVs, but on the internet, yelling guys are a dime a dozen.

This is what Walter Berglund realises in Jonathan Franzen's Freedom. He loses it, Howard Beale-style, at a press conference for an employer who has tricked him into betraying his environmentalist ideals, and ends up screaming "WE ARE A CANCER ON THE WORLD" from the podium. After years of playing nice, he abandons the role he refers to as "Mr Good" and proclaims his long-suppressed misanthropy, the kernel of flinty self-righteousness that, in the age of Network, passed as the equivalent of integrity. A video of Walter's tirade makes it to YouTube and he becomes a viral star, travelling the country with his assistant-turned-lover, speaking to cheering cadres of "the 9/11-conspiracy-mongers and the tree-sitters and the Fight Club devotees and the PETA-ites". He can't, however, fail to see in "the loony rage of his readership" a mirror of his own. By allowing him finally, finally to express himself to the world, and to congregate with people who wholeheartedly agree with him, the internet presents Walter with this unsavoury fact: he is a crank.

The victims of TV, as depicted by its traditional critics, are hammered down into mute, uniform cogs, then sold as docile lots of consumers to Madison Avenue, their individuality smothered, their innermost selves silenced. But what if, on the introduction of a new medium that allows everyone to speak their secret, supposedly unique selves, we discover that thousands upon thousands of people are saying pretty much the same stuff in pretty much the same words? What if the individuality we hold so dear turns out to be indistinguishable from the individuality of countless others? How individual is it, then, really? What if the "common rubble of banality" is, in fact, us?

Social networking, the latest iteration of the internet, promises a utopia in which every participant has a voice, but it cannot guarantee that we will like what we hear. In Gary Shteyngart's Super Sad True Love Story, set in the near future, people wear mobile devices around their necks that permit real-time rankings of everyone around them. Out for a night at a bar with some buddies, the hapless middle-aged narrator, Lenny Abramov, is informed that the pretty girl he's been eyeing has rated his "MALE HOTNESS as 120 out of 800, PERSONALITY 450". Not only can the bar's patrons run full financial solvency checks on each other, they can assess such data as cholesterol levels and life expectancy estimates; athletic, religious and sexual preferences; recent purchases; and whether or not a possible hook-up's past experiences of child abuse will make her particularly vulnerable to a suitor's advances.

"It means 'Form a Community'," one of Lenny's pals explains when describing the app that enables these reports. "It's, like, a way to judge people. And let them judge you." Brutal scrutiny, it should be noted, is a condition of all communities, as any resident of a small town can testify. "Community" only became a buzzword for wholesome togetherness after pundits convinced Americans that their bowling-alone, couch-potato habits had left them bereft of one of life's greatest blessings. It helps to bear in mind that 17th-century Salem was a community, too. The internet did not create scapegoating, feuds and cliques, and virtual lynchings are nowhere near as fatal as the real-life kind.

Still, traditional communities survive in large part by virtue of most members knowing when to keep their mouths shut, while online social networks are formed in a climate of perpetual disclosure. Whether you belong to discussion boards for Twilight fans or Pez candy dispenser collectors or libertarian bloggers or breast cancer survivors, the only way you can actually be present in the group is by pitching in your two cents. If you're not dispensing your opinion about something you might as well not be there at all, and much of the time the mere act of piping up matters more than whatever it is you have to say. The power to offer your personal evaluation of just about everything, which was once a vindicating new option (get back at that crappy hotel in Belize by slamming it on TripAdvisor), has become kind of favour or even obligation, solicited by market research firms, by broadcasters who incessantly request texts from their listeners, and by friends with Facebook pages they want you to "like".

In a world where everyone's a critic because otherwise they wouldn't quite exist, isn't it inevitable that we will someday soon begin to review each other? Shteyngart's Lenny, freshly returned to New York after spending a year in Rome, scrambles to get caught up on the latest social technologies, terrified that he'll lose his job if he seems old and behind the times. "Learn to rate everyone around you," a colleague barks, "Get your data in order." This is, of course, a vamp on the bewildering instructions every novelist gets from his or her publisher these days: You need to be on Twitter, on Facebook, blogging. The fact that authors are able to write books precisely because they aren't spending hours every day online tends to get lost in the hunt for new ways to shore up sales.

Do the people who constantly pester us for our opinions care what each and every one of us really thinks? Sort of and not really. What they require are opinions in bulk, so many of them that they can be analysed and averaged out and processed into useful data. Only then can they be sold, and then used to encourage us to buy more stuff. Our judgments matter, but primarily in aggregate, which makes us not so different from the faceless mass of television's audience as we are sometimes led to believe. The main distinction is that the crowdsourced are active collaborators in the commodification of their opinions, while TV viewers just get to sit on their duffs.

This is the scenario extrapolated by Jennifer Egan in A Visit from the Goon Squad, published in the UK this spring. Each chapter takes place at a different point over a period of 40-plus years and concerns a loose collection of people affiliated with the music industry. In the final chapter, Alex (who is a minor character in the first chapter) reluctantly agrees to help an independent record company executive promote a concert. The two men live in a world where preverbal children, using handsets called "Starfish", can download music by "pointing", and have thereby become "arbiters of musical success". As a result, even the most rough-edged artists have retooled their images to appeal to the toddler set.

Alex is brought in to hire "parrots", people paid to "create 'authentic' word of mouth" for the first live concert by a shambling ex-janitor who appears as a brilliant but unstable young musician earlier in the book. Alex's task is to survey his 15,896 "friends", looking for those who intersect on a graph of three variables: "how much they needed money ('Need'), how connected and respected they were ('Reach'), and how open they might be to selling that influence ('Corruptibility')". There's nothing speculative about this idea, by the way; today's marketers often hire people to hang around in bars, talking up products without revealing that they're being paid to do so.

For Alex, the assignment is especially unsettling because, like many of the characters in the novel, he regards music as one of the last vestiges of the genuine in a life comprehensively penetrated by marketing. He is, like a novelist, a holdout for the idea that the value of an individual consciousness cannot be aggregated. On the other hand, "he never could quite forget that every byte of information he'd posted online (favorite color, vegetable, sexual position) was stored in the databases of multinationals who swore they would never, ever use it – that he was owned, in other words, having sold himself unthinkingly at the very point in his life when he'd felt most subversive".

Alex's team of parrots (a "blind team", none of whom knows about the others) works like a charm, and an impressive crowd gathers for the event, held at the 9/11 memorial site. And then something unengineered occurs. The ex-janitor ("a man you knew just by looking never had a page or a profile or a handle or a handset, who was part of no one's data, a guy who had lived in the cracks all these years") gets up on the stage and somehow, impossibly blows everyone away. "It may be that a crowd at a particular moment of history creates the object to justify its gathering," Alex marvels, even though he knows that he created it, and for a price.

This is the novel's grace note, Egan's assertion that the authentic can still spark and flare even when the entire apparatus surrounding it is calculated and artificial. Of course she thinks this, and why shouldn't she be right? What else is an artist but someone who believes that she can barter a little piece of herself to the world and not only preserve its essential worth, but even multiply it, by sharing it with others? She has to hope that the machinery making it all possible won't kill the thing itself. Because that machinery isn't going away, even if it does assume new forms and new powers to go with those forms. It's more than just the way we live now, it is the world we've made for ourselves, out of our selves. Like it or not, we're stuck with us.